So Much to Do by Richard Ravitch

Author:Richard Ravitch [Ravitch, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610390927
Publisher: PublicAffairs

MOST IMMEDIATELY, Koch and Carey’s opposition notwithstanding, there had to be a fare increase; and the MTA board had to vote to enact it. Orchestrating that vote was not easy. New York State has an open meetings law that requires public bodies like the MTA board to make decisions in sessions open to the public. The goal is worthy; but before the board met publicly on the fare increase, I had to know there were enough votes to pass it. To finesse the open meeting requirement, I invited all the board members to dinner at the Century Association, a private club, the night before the public vote.

At that time, in 1980, the Century admitted women as guests but not as members. When Carol Bellamy, president of the New York City Council and an MTA board member, got my invitation, she phoned me and told me in strikingly colorful language that she wasn’t about to attend a dinner at a gender-segregated club. MTA counsel warned that if the dinner took place, Carol might tell the press, and the press might make the dinner look like a private meeting. If that happened, the open meetings law would throw the legal legitimacy of the next day’s vote on the fare increase into doubt.

Further ingenuity was needed. I booked a room at the Yale Club, two blocks away from the Century Association, and sent half the board members there for dinner. With no quorum present in either place, there was no illegal meeting. I literally ran back and forth between the two places, puffing for four hours, until I was sure of the votes for the next morning.

While that problem had its comic aspects, other immediate issues were not so funny. The MTA’s contracts with workers for the Long Island Railroad and the New York City Transit system were expiring. Just three weeks after I took office, the seventeen unions of the LIRR went on strike. The LIRR was owned and heavily subsidized by the MTA. But because it was a railroad, its unions were not subject to the state’s Taylor Law, enacted after the 1966 New York City subway strike, a law that bans strikes by state public employees. Instead, labor relations on the LIRR were governed by federal law, which sent the dispute into mediation. It ended in a settlement that preserved some of the LIRR’s worst labor inefficiencies. The MTA challenged the position that federal law preempted the Taylor Law, taking the issue all the way to the US Supreme Court. We lost.

In contrast, the MTA’s dispute with Local 100 of the Transit Workers Union was governed by state law, including the Taylor Law prohibition on strikes by public employees. But the TWU had a still older tradition: if there was no new contract by midnight of the day when an existing contract expired, the union would—legally or illegally—strike. Their contract would expire on March 31, 1980. The union had not had a wage increase in five years and was seething with resentment.

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